This book traces the emergence and spread of the choreomania concept through colonial medical and ethnographic circles, showing how fantasies of instability—and of the Oriental other—haunted scientific modernity. Scenes from the archives of medical history, neurology, psychiatry, sociology, religion, and popular journalism show how the discursive history of the ‘dancing mania’ moved and transformed with its translations throughout the colonial world. From antiquarian references to ancient Greek bacchanals and medieval St. Vitus’s dances, to scientific reperformances of early modern religious e ... More

This book traces the emergence and spread of the choreomania concept through colonial medical and ethnographic circles, showing how fantasies of instability—and of the Oriental other—haunted scientific modernity. Scenes from the archives of medical history, neurology, psychiatry, sociology, religion, and popular journalism show how the discursive history of the ‘dancing mania’ moved and transformed with its translations throughout the colonial world. From antiquarian references to ancient Greek bacchanals and medieval St. Vitus’s dances, to scientific reperformances of early modern religious ecstasies, and American government anthropology, ‘choreomania’ arose to signal every sort of gestural and choreographic unrest. Village kermesses, revolutionary crowds, and neuromotor disorders—including hysteria, epilepsy, and chorea—were among the many unruly forms of locomotion indiscriminately compared to bacchanalian turmoil. So too, charges of spontaneous political agitation levied against demonstrators from Africa and South America to the South Seas reveal heightened anxieties about the spread of social disorder. Initially employed to describe ‘contagious’ popular dances, jerking movements, and convulsions, with decolonization, the ‘dancing disease’ increasingly described the fitful drama of anti-European revolt. Closely indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, this book opens a new chapter on the way we think epidemic madness and the organization and disorganization of bodies and disciplines in the modern age. Setting ideas about disruptively moving bodies at the heart of the scientific enterprise, this book argues that disciplines themselves were at once more porous and mobile than is commonly allowed, and that ‘dance’ itself has to be radically reimagined across fields.